Michael Grant - Monster

Cruz had removed most of the blood from her face and neck, but Shade went to her, took a tissue and leaned in to wipe a fugitive blood smear from the corner of Cruz’s mouth.

The gesture embarrassed Cruz, who turned her attention again to the bookshelf beside her. “Veronica Rossi. Andrew Smith. Lindsay Cummings. Dashner. Marie Lu. Daniel Kraus.” Reading the authors’ names from the spines. “And Dostoyevsky? Faulkner? Gertrude Stein? David Foster Wallace? Virginia Woolf?”

“I have eclectic tastes,” Shade said. She waited to see what Cruz made of the rest of her collection.

“ The Science of the Perdido Beach Anomaly .” Cruz frowned. “ Powers and Possibilities: The Meaning of the Perdido Beach Anomaly . That sounds dramatic. The Physics of the Perdido Beach Anomaly. Way too math-y for me. Our Story: Surviving the FAYZ. I read that one myself—I guess everyone did. I didn’t like the movie though—they obviously toned it way down.”

“Mmmm.”

“You’re very into the Perdido Beach thing.”

Shade nodded. “Some would say obsessed.”

Some. Like Malik.

“And you like science.”

“My father is a professor at Northwestern, head of astrophysics. It runs in the family.”

“And your mom?”

“She’s dead.” Shade cursed herself silently. Four years of saying those words and she still couldn’t get them out without a catch in her voice.

“I’m sorry,” Cruz said, her brow wrinkling in a frown.

“Thank you,” Shade said levelly. She had the ability to place a big, giant “full stop” on the end of subjects she did not want to pursue, and Cruz got the hint.

“My father is a plumbing contractor,” Cruz said. “We used to live in Skokie, but, well, I had problems at the school. It was a Catholic school and I guess they like their students to be either male or female, but not all-of-the-above, or neither, or, you know, multiple-choice. I started out wearing the boys’ uniform and they didn’t like it when I switched to a skirt.”

“No?”

“It was a bit short,” Cruz admitted slyly, “but they don’t make a lot of plaid skirts in my size.”

“What do you do when you’re not provoking violence at bus stops?”

Cruz had a silent laugh, an internal one that expressed itself in quiet snorts, wheezes and wide grins, sort of the diametric opposite of Malik. “Are you asking what I want to be when I grow up? That’s my other secret. I’ve gotten to the point where I can mostly deal with the gender stuff, but writing . . . I mean, you tell people you want to write and they roll their eyes.”

“I’ll be sure to look away when I roll my eyes,” Shade promised.

“Yes, I want to be Veronica Roth when I grow up. You know she’s from here, right? She went to Northwestern.”

“What do you write about?”

Cruz shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know. It’s probably just therapy, you know? Working out my own issues, but using fictional characters.”

“Isn’t that what all fiction writers do?”

Cruz did a short version of her internalized laugh.

Shade nodded, head at a tilt, eyeing Cruz closely. “You . . . are interesting.” Something in the way she said it made it a benediction, a pronouncement, and a small, gratified smile momentarily appeared on Cruz’s lips.

After that they chatted about books, ate chips and salsa, and drank orange juice; they watched a little TV, with Shade leaving the choice of shows to Cruz because, of course, Shade was testing her, or at least studying her.

Cruz actually is interesting. And . . . useful?

The day wore on, the swelling in Cruz’s ankle worsened until it was twice its normal size, but then began slowly to deflate like a balloon with a slow leak. The pain receded as well, beaten back by ibuprofen, ice, and the recuperative powers of youth.

All the while Shade considered. She liked this odd person, this e) in a True/False world, this person who tried to wear a skirt to Catholic school, this smart but not too smart, funny, self-deprecating, seemingly aimless creature who wanted to be a writer.

Person , Shade chided herself. Not creature, person . She was aware that she had a tendency to analyze people with the intensity and the emotional distance of a scientist counting bacteria on a slide.

Blame DNA.

Shade needed help, back-up, support, she knew that, and her only currently available choice was Malik, who would resist and delay and generally try to get in her way. Malik was a chronic rescuer, one of those boys—young man, actually, in Malik’s case—who thought it was their duty in life to get between every bully and their victim and every fool and their fate. Had he been at the bus stop he would have launched himself in between the two football players and gotten a beat-down, and it would be his blood she was wiping away, and him she was making ice packs for, and him here in her bedroom . . .

And that is not a helpful place to go, Shade.

They had been drawn to each other from the start, four years ago when Shade had returned to live with her father after the life-changing disaster at Perdido Beach. At first they’d been friends. He had visited her in the hospital after her second surgery, the one to repair the nerves on the right side of her face—she had not been able to feel her cheek. In later years they had become a great deal more, each the other’s first.

The break-up had been Shade’s decision, not Malik’s. He had wanted more of her, more commitment, more openness. But Shade liked her secrets. She liked her privacy, her control over her life.

Her obsession.

Now Shade reached a conclusion: time to pull the pin on the hand grenade, or light the fuse, or some such simile.

Fortune favors the bold, and all that.

“My father is actually doing some work for the government,” Shade said.

“Like for NASA?”

“Mmmm, well, not exactly. How are you at keeping secrets, Cruz?”

Cruz waved a languid hand down her body. “I’m a gender fluid kid who had been passing as muy macho until, like, six months ago. I can keep a secret.”

“Yeah.” Shade nodded, tilted her head, considered, careful to keep a gently amused expression on her face to conceal the cold appraisal in her eyes.

She owes me. I rescued her. She has no friends.

She’ll do it.

“My dad’s, um, tracking the path of what they’re calling an ASO—Anomalous Space Object. Several, actually. Seven to be precise, ASO-Two through ASO-Eight.”

Cruz lifted a plucked eyebrow. “What happened to ASO-One?”

“Oh, ASO-One already landed on Earth years ago. They think all eight ASOs are pieces from the same source, an asteroid or planetoid that blew up, sending some interstellar shrapnel our way. One of the pieces—ASO-One—managed to catch a ride on Jupiter’s gravity well and got here ahead of the rest. Just about nineteen years ahead. The other fragments took a longer route. But ASO-Two through Eight are scheduled to intercept Earth over the next few weeks.”

Shade saw that Cruz had not made the connection, not figured it out, and that was a little disappointing. But then a flicker and a frown, and Cruz made direct eye contact and asked, “Nineteen years ago? Wasn’t that . . .”

Shade nodded slowly. “Mmmm. Nineteen years ago ASO-One entered Earth orbit and slammed into a nuclear power plant just north of the town of Perdido Beach, California.”

That froze Cruz solid for a long minute. Her eyes searched Shade’s face, trying to see whether Shade was just kidding. Because this wasn’t some little secret like ‘I’ve got a crush on . . .’ This was a secret two high school kids who barely knew each other should not possess.